


With Peaceful Wings Unfurled

by Tammany



Series: Christmas, 2015 [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Fluff, M/M, Mini-adventure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5503385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a busy year, so this year I did not manage to write a new set of Advent stories. I have managed to throw this together. Mycroft and Lestrade, acquaintance to lovers, by way of a minor adventure...and some Christmas carols Welcome to an evening choral event at Westminster Abbey, featuring the Westminster Abbey Choir.</p><p>YouTube:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkK3nl5-Pko</p><p>Frankly it's not my favorite version of the song, even if it is the one the Westminster Abbey choir prefer. My favorite is this one:</p><p>YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljrf6G1kmto</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Peaceful Wings Unfurled

He almost didn’t spot Mr. Holmes; he was too busy balancing professional observation with the bubble and fizz of anticipation. It was the Christmas season, with celebrations, events, performances, parties…the Met was working overtime trying to keep a few eyes on everything, worried about the recent attacks in Paris…worried about the constant push of emigres and refugees seeing sanctuary. Lestrade, his divorce long over, his secret work with MI5 and MI6 never entirely out of his mind, had been more than happy to volunteer. After all-free tickets to London’s premier events? Always at the prime dates and time, when the theaters would be crammed otherwise? And good seats—if you didn’t mind being in The Gods? And what the hell, he was a Gods kind of fellow anyway, wasn’t he? Up in the Gods or down in the mosh-pit— that had always been him.

Not that he could sit in the Gods here. Not at Westminster Abbey. Not with the King’s Choir singing. He grinned, looking around at it all: the gothic done up grand for Christmas. The high, high peaked arches, disappearing into heaven above him. The long run of the nave.  The energy of the place was arching off of every detail like sparks off a cat’s back in midwinter, and a mini-stampede of people in vestments rushed in and out to check this and that was just right.

There were candles and a slow seep of people in off the streets. Lestrade found an end seat, about halfway up the nave, exiting out onto the side-aisle. He politely let people ease past his knees and find seats further on, but the few who not so subtly suggest he budge in a seat or two got a chipper smile and bluff bollocks about medication, bowels, and the possible need for a quick exit. Which also ensured no one chose to sit right next to him.

He grinned, chin ducked low into the raised collar of his overcoat. Truth was he was good at his job, and he was good because he could out-normal even the dead-ordinary. He could make you think of your most boring, plebian brother-in-law, or the char who came in and cleaned up your flat and bored you stiff with stories about “our Neil” and “that girl” he was seeing. Medication and bowels wasn’t the half of what he could marshal in his efforts to be dismissed as too ordinary to notice.

He straightened and boldly craned his neck, people-watching with shameless glee—just like your worst neighbor. No one thought twice of it, or knew that the cheerful older bloke watching the crowd like it was good telly was watching far more than he seemed to be watching.

He checked faces. Tried to evaluate each, flashing this image and that from his roster of known players in terror circles. He was lucky, he thought: London was at least an equal opportunity terror target. He didn’t need to fear he’d start seeing all Muslims as bad and all Europeans as good—no. He had the remains of the radical IRA to worry about, and the crazier Little England nutters who wanted “England for the English.” He had lunatic Ukrainians and all flavors of post-colonials. Violent nut-jobs came in all flavors in London…you couldn’t get too smug in your bigotry, because if you did around the corner would come someone who looked like your idea of “normal” strapped into a semtex jacket crammed with explosives.

Tonight didn’t look too bad. Of course, there were more plainclothesmen up front, presumably cutting the more obvious concerns out at the door. No one wanted Christmas ruined…

He and Sherlock had reviewed the information after the Paris attacks. They’d put in their own report on the state of security in London. In the end, they’d said what all honest security experts had to say…

There’s no such thing as safe. There is such a thing as “too much security.” England would only be England as long as it’s people, in the end, chose valor over suspicion, and living over a half-death lived in “secured” coffins, peering out at the deadly world from a cocoon of cowardice. What would London be without its shows, its concerts, its music halls and its pubs?

He contacted the team about one woman in a bulky coat. He was glad to hear a polite trip to the ladies with one of the women on the team proved she was just chubby and fond of fiberfill parkas.

The energy in the old abbey rose, rose, rose, until it seemed to vibrate before even the first plucked harp string or note from the glorious old organ. It was only in the last minutes before the big chords roared out, bringing everyone to their feet for the processional, that he spotted Mr. Holmes.

The man was dressed as always, in a trim Crombie overcoat, his perfectly pressed wool trousers showing below. If Lestrade could have seen all the way to the floor, he would no doubt find Mycroft’s perfectly polished shoes, as well: they would be elegant, sleek, and no doubt hand made by London craftsmen working from individualized lathes.

Lestrade’s first thought was sudden spiking fear—what was Mr. Holmes doing here? What was up? His heart hammered, and he scowled. Mycroft was largely a hands-off supervisor. Even in his troubled dealings with his baby brother, he made an honest effort not to wade in if he thought it could be helped. If he was down at Westminster Abbey, it was for a reason.

He narrowed his eyes, and leaned down into his overcoat lapels, murmuring.

‘Oi, th’Iceman’s here. We have issues?”

There was a long pause, and then soft swearing. “Bugger, that is him. Sod-all. Gimme a mo’, I’ll call in and find out.”

Lestrade grunted, and waited, hearing the chatter in the background as someone called back to Mycroft’s home office.  Highly inflected discussion was held. Then the backup, no doubt hunched in a lorry somewhere scowling at CCTV information from the Abbey, came online again.

“His second says leave ‘im be. ‘E ‘asn’t ‘ad word of nuffin, just out to hear the concert, yeah?”

Lestrade knew how hard Muncy had worked to get rid of that lower-class Cockney-into-Estuary accent of his…and there the poor lad was dropping his aitches and turning his nothing to nuffin’. He wondered if Mr. Holmes knew he did that to few who knew exactly what he did? He nodded, very slightly, and murmured, “Fair enough, then. He’s another pair of eyes on the ground, then. Given his eyes, I’m glad he’s here.”

He was, too. Mycroft could spot almost anything spottable. He couldn’t see everything, and he couldn’t always see fast enough—but only Sherlock rivaled Mycroft’s ability to spot anything suspicious and ID it properly. The two brothers were born trainspotters.

He chuckled under his breath. He could see them, somehow: two boys, the elder large and a bit soft and plump, his carrot hair fluttering in the breeze, his freckles showing like the stippling on a speckled cow, the younger almost too thin and dainty. Both of them in anoraks, carrying  spotters’ notebooks, leaning together on a steel pipe railing looking down into the tunnel exit of an underpass, hoping to spot something exceptional. Or birds—had they been birders in their youths?

He realized he didn’t know if the Holmes boys were country toffs of city toffs. You got both kinds. He frowned, letting his own reliable instincts consider it.

Country toffs, he decided. For all both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes were now London habitues, there was something about them that suggested the Ur-Englishman, saturated in gymkhanas and Women’s Institute jam-and-Jerusalem and county concerns. He was willing to bet they could both speak with confidence about obscure country things like mangel-worzels and spinneys and ha-has and deeded access and similar things that left Lestrade, a true Londoner, a bit confused.

He watched as Mycroft found a place of his own. Unlike the many who’d tried to intimidate Lestrade into budging down his row of seats, he did terrorize the folks in his chosen row into scootching along and making room for him, giving himself an outer aisle seat much like Lestrade had, only a few rows up and on the opposite side of the nave. No doubt like Lestrade he wanted free room to bolt out into the aisle if he had to.

Lestrade smiled, trying to imagine Mr. Holmes in hot pursuit of a criminal. He knew his superior had served in the field before. MI6 didn’t promote pure analysts so high in quite the way they had Holmes: no one without experience of the realities of the field should command agents or run missions. But he had no sense that Mycroft had ever enjoyed field work, or even been spectacularly good at it. Good enough—there were no rumors of the Iceman being complete bollocks at field work. But while Lestrade could feel a grin grow, and get a faint rush of adrenaline just thinking of giving chase and nicking a suspect, he was willing to bet Mycroft only grimaced and hunched deep into his elegant Crombie. Still, he’d picked the right seat if he ever did have to give chase…

The organ roared out a chord to shake the rafters. The lights dropped, leaving only safety lights and flickering candle light. The congregation rose up, and the procession began, accompanied by a haunting “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

It was glorious. Even as he kept a steady watch on the mob, alert for trouble, Lestrade shivered with it. He wasn’t Christian…or didn’t think of himself as such. He knew what most people his generation knew, though. He could stagger his way through the Lord’s prayer, follow along with the creed if he had the Book of Common Prayer in his hands. And he knew the music. It was as deep in the culture as jam-and-Jerusalem. As the Beatles. As pubs and crazy contradictions like Labor and love of the Queen. The service did something to him.

“Break forth, oh, beauteous, heavenly light.” The lights rose, there were more candles lit. Song after song was sung, and the truth was he knew most of them. He stood tall and let his voice ring out with the rest of all London—the crammed abbey-full of people who never came out except for Easter and Christmas—and even more who only came out for Christmas. As a boy he’d sung rough and ragged, a punker shouting out London youth’s frustration with the world. Now, older, wiser, more complicated, he let his baritone sweeten and warm, and he sang with the rest, matching harmonies to the choir when he could.

“Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem.”

“Once in Royal David’s City.”

“Joy to the World.”

He was a people-person—or at least, he was an introvert who loved being surrounded by people, double-cocooned in his own personal bubble of privacy, then wrapped warm in the swell and surge of humans being human. A city-born lad. A copper who had once loved walking the beat, his mind still and suspended in meditative calm as the heart’s blood of London’s populace flowed past him. The gangbangers and skinheads, the blue collar workers, the students, the office workers, men and women and children, all active and in motion, like a murmuration of starlings, and Lestrade just one more starling in the flock, moving effortlessly in the ebb and flow, leaning into the currents and eddies. Here, in Westminster Abbey, cloaked in his fellow Londoners, he felt at home and fulfilled, and his heart swelled and the high hit him—a perfect antidote to the melancholy of Christmas alone in his fifties. He was suddenly so glad he’d volunteered for this duty…

He didn’t shift from that perfect, peaceful still point in the rushing glory of the night until they started singing “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Even then the splendor would have held him if he hadn’t seen Mycroft’s head jerk up from over the hymnal, reminding Lestrade of the startled toss of a mounted policeman’s horse, or the sudden alert tension of a police dog. Something was wrong.

He was seats back from Mycroft, with no clear view of his face, but he knew something was wrong. Even as the younger man darted out into the side aisle and paced away, Lestrade was worming out of his seat and matching stride, heading first down the aisle to the back of the nave, then across, and back up, noting as he went that Mycroft was headed for the Cloisters to the right of the main church. When he reached the northern entrance, Lestrade dodged right also, and found himself in the North Cloister of the abbey.

It was shadowed and cool. The ornate windows were framed in carved stone supported by columnar uprights dividing the windows into triplets. The upper portion of the windows were ornate stained glass with lacy leading, the lower part plate glass looking out onto the green grass garth of the cloister. On either side of the cloister were long stone benches. Mr. Holmes sat in the nearest, twisted on the bench so he sat sideways, back to Lestrade. His shoulders drooped; his head hung down—whether in dejection or prayer Lestrade could not tell.

He no longer seemed in a panic—and, yet...

You don’t go back in without asking whether there’s a threat or not, Lestrade thought, imagining the briefing the next day. “And you failed to ask Mr. Holmes what he had observed that disturbed him, Mr. Lestrade? No comment on the armed assassin he saw slip by, who left him injured in the cloister—too injured to recognize your presence? You didn’t even check? You were trying to be polite? Really? Polite? I see….”

He cleared his throat. “Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes jerked, and froze for a fleeting second. Without turning he said, “Yes.”

Lestrade weighed the tone of voice—controlled, of course. Always controlled. But underneath was something else…something he couldn’t quite sort out from the ringing tones coming from the church nave behind him, crooning, “Peace on the earth, good will to men, from heaven’s most gracious king…”

“Are you all right?” he asked.

The head lifted higher. He could see the pale skin showing through at the very crown of Holmes’ head, where nature was just starting to gift him with a monk’s tonsure.  “Fine,” Holmes answered, in a voice so still and frozen it was immediately obvious that he was not fine at all—and wished no one to witness him all undone.

Lestrade coughed again, lightly, sudden sorrow rising up in him. He knew, as he’d always known, that the Iceman was the more fragile of the two brothers. Stronger, yes. Smarter, yes. Better able to fit into the world, in certain ways. More successful. But pains and sorrows and fears Sherlock would brush aside with a surly growl struck home with Mycroft Holmes. The traces of empathy, of social awareness, of generosity and altruism that made the elder Holmes the more effective of the two in a workaday world were also his downfall. “Yessir. I thought—you left so quickly I thought maybe you’d seen something.”

The other man shook his head, still not looking back. “No.” His voice was husky and rough. He cleared his throat and tried again. “No. Just…” He fell silent, as the ache in his voice just rose harder and tighter. Whatever he was going to say was lost in their shared knowledge that if he tried to say it, he’d break.

“Yessir,” Lestrade said…then hesitated.

He was closer to Sherlock, he thought. And, yet, he was more ambivalent about Sherlock, too. There were still too many times he wasn’t sure the Great Man was going to ever really be a good man. Too many times Sherlock wounded him, or someone on his team, or one of their witnesses, or even their suspects, by pure, malicious intent. Or indifference, cutting the quickest route to a destination only Sherlock could see. Mycroft in some strange, isolated way, was good.

He stepped closer. “You here as part of security?”

Holmes, still not facing him, shrugged. “That and the music. Perhaps the only part of Christmas that can be endured.”

“I hear that. Bit of a treat for me, too. Come out, hear the music, see the people. Makes up for a lot.” It did, he thought. The rush, the music, the energy—it made up for an enormous lot—for a marriage lost, for children never had, for a personal circle kept small, and largely ignorant of what his actual life and duty entailed. It made Christmas…Christmas. “makes me feel like I’m all peppermint and tinsel inside” he said, groping for words.

The other man gave a sudden snort, like a horse huffing its disapproval. “Good heavens…How—“

He never got to finish whatever he’d been going to say. The light in the dim walkway arched with moving shadows for a moment, and a third person came staggering into the cloister.

He was young, Lestrade thought, already taking him in. He was ungainly, with a bad haircut, skin that saw too little sun and probably too few vitamins, eyes large and dark and terrified. He wore a puffy fiber-filled parka.

A parka that looked too fat.

Lestrade frowned. Even as he stepped forward, the boy stepped back, wavered—prepared to run ack into the church—then turned, face a mask of fear.

“I can’t,” he gasped. “I can’t. Help…please. Help me…”

Already suspicious of what was under way, Lestrade stepped forward. “Hold on, son—just hold on,” he said, then leaned over his pickup, trying to reach his team. “Mayday—got a live one in the cloister. Get me bomb squad…”

“No time,” the boy gasped, even as Mr. Holmes uncoiled from the bench like a sooty cobra, all poise and speed and danger. “Here, boy, stop,” he said then, voice raising as the young man spun and dashed down the east walk of the Cloister. He was off, then, and from that point on Lestrade was too busy keeping up to think things through all that clearly.

The boy had barely made it more than a yard down the east walk when Mr. Holmes pinned him up against the wall, fingers scrambling for the zipper-pull of the fluffy parka. The boy was stuttering and gasping and half-sobbing—things like “too late,” and “stupid,stupid, stupid,” and “coward….” Holmes paid no attention, instead squatting and pulling the jacket wide, showing the packs of explosives and the wires and duct tape and the timer.

“Bugger,” he husked, frowning. “Bugger-all. Lestrade, tell them to empty the church…and…no. No time.” His hand groped absently from pocket to pocket of his clothing, looking for something and not finding. “Do you carry a knife? A utility tool? Anything?”

Lestrade huffed, caught between terror and amusement. “Better thank your stars,” he growled, fishing the Leatherman out of his pocket. “Never go without it.”

“Open it to the wire snips,” Holmes said, without looking away from the array—the flicking numbers of the digital clock, the tangle of leads and triggers. He held out his hand like a surgeon to an OR nurse, expecting prompt service.

Lestrade flicked it open and handed it, handle first, into Holmes’ palm. “You’ve got bomb squad training.”

“Not precisely,” Holmes said, voice dry to the point of arid. “Rather the reverse…” His voice dropped off, and he frowned. “Who put it together for you, boy?”

The young man wasn’t following. He jerked weakly at the hands knit into his parka, but shook his head. “Stupid..”

“Yes, well, that goes without saying,” Holmes snapped, voice pure acid. Lestrade, murmuring into his mic to get the evacuation under way, frowned, wondering  if it was smart to slice at a hysterical terror bomber that way. Not that he was going to risk saying so.

Holmes continued, peeling back the jacket, rolling it off the boy’s arms, leaving a near-skeletal gawk shivering in the chill of the Cloister. He clucked, disapprovingly. “You’re as bad as Sherlock was,” he grumbled. “Food is not an option, stupid. Your body may be a machine, but it still obeys the laws of thermodynamics.” He shot a fierce look up into the narrow face, the terrified dark eyes. “Who did this?”

The boy licked his lips. “Me?”

“And who else?”

The boy shook his head. “Got it off th’ innernet.”

The sound Holmes made could not be reproduced, but it was compacted of scorn and dismay and horrified disapproval.

“For God’s sake, Sher….idiot. Is life so bad that suicide itself isn’t enough? You’ve got to go messy?” There were years of frustration boiled into those words. Lestrade, listening, didn’t fail to note the near-miss on the name, or the obvious parallel with Mycroft’s little brother. “Do you have any notion what a stupid, stupid bomb this is?”

The kid began to rally, shoving out his jaw and pouting. “Bad enough you’re worried about disarming it.”

“That’s because you were too dumb to put in an off switch,” Mycroft snapped back. “And the wiring is simply dreadful. You should be ashamed.” He tutted and frowned, and the bomb team came tumbling into the Cloister, and Lestrade could hear the sounds of the security team getting people out of the abbey.

“Stay back,” Holmes snapped at the team coming in. “He’s got himself jerry-rigged up like no one’s business. It’s a miracle he’s not taken out ten civilians and a kidney just walking in here.” He risked a look over at them. “Lestrade, take the tool kit and bring it over here.”

“You know what you’re doing then, guv?” One of the bomb team eased forward and handed Lestrade a heavy metal chest of tools, looking at Mycroft the whole time.

Lestrade wondered if the bomb team could read Holmes as well as he could. What he saw and heard as he eased over and gently put the tool kit down in reach, was a man terrified—but more terrified to not-act than to act.

“I’ve got a remote idea.” Holmes looked up into the boy’s angry, frightened face, and made a snarky moue. “Oh, don’t glare daggers at me, boy. I’ve been treated to tantrums on a scale you won’t match even if I get us out of this and you live to be a hundred. Now—let me guess. You were online and you lumbered into A-nar-kay, right?”

The boy blinked, then murmured, “How’d you guess?”

“Besides the wiring layout?” He sniffed, making it clear that the kid had copped his plans from a wiring moron. “You’re not ideological, are you—not doing this for Allah or Jesus or for the pure Caucasian race or to free ‘the four green fields’, are you?”

The kid blinked, and frowned. “Wha’?”

His voice was pure East Ender, and Lestrade’s heart went out to him. He’d known dozens of kids like this growing up and in his days as a constable. Saw ‘em often enough even now, sobbing their hearts out after they did something bloody and stupid and bloody-stupid that they couldn’t undo.  “He means you’re not political, kid,” he said, letting the Estuary tones in his voice suggest kinship and understanding. “You gotta forgive ‘im. He only talks toff.”

“Oi,” Holmes said, sarky as hell as his fingers traced gently over the wires of the bomb. “’At’s all you know, ennit? You fink I got nuffin’ but nice togs and an attitude, but I’m sharper’n that, mate.”

Both the boy and Lestrade studied him. Lestrade, after a moment, grinned and looked at the kid. “Yeah. Ok. He’ll pass.”

The kid broke into a sudden chuckle that instantly turned to terror as he realized he was moving at the same time Holmes was exploring the wires crisscrossing his belly and entering the space behind the clock trigger. He gave Lestrade a tight, frightened smile, all crooked teeth and nerves. “He’ll do,” he said, at a near whisper.

“Tell the team to get me some light,” Holmes snapped. “Now.”

Lestrade turned and said in a lower voice, “You heard the man. Someone go find some light—there’s got to be some portable lamps around somewhere.”

Two of the bomb team nodded and went back into the nave of the church. The third, hovering, said, “Is he any good?” jerking his chin toward Holmes.

Lestrade shrugged. “I’ll put it this way—I’ve never seen him take on anything and turn out to be no good at it. Well—except being a social butterfly.”

“I do that well, too, if forced,” Holmes growled, then said something in technical jargon that escaped Lestrade entirely, but seemed to comfort the remaining team member. For a short period the two muttered occult incantations at each other, communicating some course of action that meant nothing to either the boy or Lestrade.

“It’s OK, kid. When did you set the timer for?”

The kid said, “Midnight.” Holmes, however, said “Half-past eleven” at the same time. The kid jerked, then stilled.

Lestrade glanced at his watch. Eleven-fifteen.

“Good. There’s time” he said, and smiled at the boy. “Don’t want to rush the experts.” He ignored the horrified glance the bomb team member shot him. “So, kid. You’re not a political—we got that far. So why?”

The kid blinked and crimped his eyes shut. “It’s all sodding bollocks,” he said.

“What’s all bollocks?”

The boy shrugged, then flinched as Holmes growled under his breath. “All of it,” he said in weaker tones. “Everyfing. School’s bollocks. No jobs—that’s bollocks. Whole world is bollocks, ennit?” There was a world of grievance and weary despair in the few inarticulate words. “I got bugger-all comin’ up…Bugger-all to hope for. An…” he sighed, and dropped his head, studying Mycroft’s long fingers touching here, there, tracing a line, tracing another. “I dunno. It’s Christmas. Peace on earth. All that crap…” He trailed off, more depressed than angry, more hopeless than righteous. “Thought I’d go out wiff a bang, you know? Maybe someone would get my name right…”

“A modest ambition,” Mycroft said, voice still tart. “Not, I will admit, the best way I can imagine, but a way, nonetheless. And your name is?”

“Alf,” the boy said wearily. “Alfred. ‘Cause my mum said it fit in better than Faisal Otto O'Malley. She said anyone could be Afred.”

Mycroft clucked disapprovingly. “No, no, no. Not anyone can be Alfred. That’s the thing with distinctive names. Only the few and the proud can pull them off. It takes guts to be an Alfred in this day and age, when everyone else is a Kevin or a Nigel or a Neil. Poor woman had all the wrong expectations. No—if you’re going to be an Alfred, you’ve got to go big with it.” He looked up and Lestrade saw mischief sparkle in the clever, pale eyes. “Aaaaaalfred!” he proclaimed. “Alfred! Never let them call you Alf. It degrades your greatness.”

The boy—Alfred—choked back a giggle and looked down at his belly and the plastique taped tight. “You gonna save me, mister?”

“I’m going to make a valiant attempt,” Mycroft said, voice dry again. “The odds are in your favor.”

Just then one of the team arrived with two entire standing sconces of candles. “Couldn’t find one of those light stands like they use for photoshoots and emergency lighting’ he said, “but I thought this might help.”

Mycroft glanced, grunted surly agreement that made it clear that the candles were only slightly better than nothing, then jerked his chin. “Here. So the light shines over my shoulder. Lestrade, look in that ool kit and see if you can find a hook—anything like an old-fashioned button hook or a crochet hook.

“Why?” Lestrade said, grunting as he squatted down and began pillaging his way through the trays of the chest.

“Because I can’t risk flipping the clock, and I need to try to work out what attaches where,” Mycroft snapped right back. “I can’t work out what he’s got tied to what else.”

“That’s kind of a bugger, ennit?” Lestrade drawled.

“Somewhat of a bugger, yes.” Mycroft met Lestrade’s eyes, and for the first time Lestrade could see the other man’s emotions, previously hidden in snark and attitude. He was scared…scared so badly that Lestrade felt it too, deep in his gut.

“Can we cut him out of it?”

Mycroft shook his head, a tight, controlled little gesture.

Lestrade grunted, and passed him what looked like a boot hook salvaged from a second hand shop, or from one of the stalls along Camden Passage. It had an ivory handle and a brass wire twist ending in a sturdy round hook. “Here—this do?”

Mycroft accepted in and looked it over. He nodded silently and returned to his work, leaning to one side to let the candle-light shimmer into the work area.

Lestrade licked his lips, and thought about whether it was time to be wise, not good, and excuse himself. After all, here he was, just a glorified, over-trained tool-ape. Seemed a helluva job to risk his life for.

Then he looked at Mycroft, bent over the tangled wires and gummy straps of duct tape, his face sober and tense. He looked at the kid—Alfred—white and sweating. He sighed.

“So—what was the last straw, kid?”

The boy looked up, then looked back down, lids veiling pain. “Got beat up,” he mumbled.

Mycroft clucked. “Never a good start to the holidays, I always say.”

The boy glowered. “Lot you know about it.”

Myfroft sniffed, never looking up from his work. “Actually, I know rather more than I’d like. If nothing else my younger brother usually chose the holidays to start acting out with a vengeance. I’ve spent more than one Christmas with a black eye that might have more justly landed on Sherlock.”

The kid scowled. “Wasn’t asking for it. Just got jumped.”

“Mmmm?” Mycroft’s reedy tenor soared, tempting the boy to continue.

“Jus’ Dai Weller an’ his gang,” the boy said. He seemed to be studying the top of Mycroft’s head—the soft fox-brown hair so neatly combed, refusing to apologize for the receding hair line or the bald spot starting at the crown.

“Gang?”

“Well, not a gang-gang, you know? Jus’ Dai and ‘is mates. They don’ like me.” He sighed. “They kick the shit outta me when they can. Chased me all over th neighbor’ood las’ week.”

“You go to school with this lot?” Lestrade asked, sparing Mycroft the need to converse.

“Yeah.” The kid sighed. “Bad enough before we all tested. I came out passin’ the GCSE’s. School wants me to take A-levels, go on to uni.” He snorted. “As if. An’ they posted it, and pulled me up on stage an announced it to the school, and next thing I got Dai an’ his mates all over me, callin’ me faggot and swot and sayin’ I’m shaggin’ the head for grades.”

Lestrade made a face. “That sort—yeah. Buncha berks, but that doesn’t make your end any easier.”

Mcroft muttered something.

“What’s that, Mike?”

“I was just saying that as stupid as the berks are, they didn’t strap themselves into the plastique vest and put the rest of us at risk.” Mycroft looked up into the boy’s face and arched one brow high. “Suicide is rarely a good choice. Suicide that takes strangers along with you is simply evil.” His eyes were cold and sharp, and the boy flinched. “If you ever want to kill yourself again,” Mycroft continued, “...come to me. I’ve got plenty of work for suicidal idiots. Some of it even saves other people’s lives. You could learn how to defuse bombs, for instance. Always a place for a good explosives expert.”

The boy blinked in confused uncertainty, and Lestrade had to choke back a chuckle, even in the tension of the situation. When he did, Mycroft rounded on him, snapping, “And you—if you call me Mike again, I will let you sort out this mess on Alfred’s belly…and it would serve you right.”

“Yes, Mycroft,” Lestrade said, meekly.

The boy goggled. “Mycroft?”

Mycroft arched a brow at him again, and said, “We can discuss it further after I finish this job.” He leaned low, hooked the hook over one wire, then wiggled it forward, under a patch of tape, then behind the timer, sliding it along until it could slide no further. He frowned.  He took the Leatherman Lestrade had lent him, and measured the face of the timer, wobbling the hook lightly.  He turned his head and called to the team, “One of you come over and see what you think. I believe I’ve got the correct wire, but I can’t be sure….”

The senior member of the bomb team came over and squatted to one side, blocking Lestrade’s view of the work. “So what’s up, guv?”

They conferred, with Lestrade barely making head nor tail of what they were saying. The boy, too, leaned over, brows furrowed, listening to every word the two men said. He was scared. Lestrade could see it—the faint sparkle of sweat on his upper lip, clinging to the baby-fine black down of not-yet-moustache just beginning to grow in. He could see it in the way the kid gnawed his lips.

“Can you translate any of that?” he asked, more to keep the kid busy than because he wanted to know. Bombs were not his division—no way, no how. But the kid just shook his head and continued listening.

“You think it’s worth the gamble?” Mycroft asked.

The other expert shrugged. “I don’t see a safer gamble,” he said, reluctantly, in a voice that told Lestrade that “bang” was as likely an outcome as “whew.”

Mycroft nodded. Then, fast, firm, without warning, he gripped the ivory base of the hook tight—and twisted, with a wrenching motion.

The kid squawked, Lestrade shouted in nervous reflex, the senior bomb man swore…

But nothing blew up, and the clock on the boy’s belly stopped.

“I think that’s done it, then,:” Mycroft said, voice sounding thin and airy with tension released.

“Looks like,” the senior bomb man said.

Mycroft looked up at the boy. “I’m going to let them handle this from here,” he said. “I…need to go home. But I’m ordering them to bring you to me in the morning, you understand? You’ll spend the night in lock-up, but in the morning you’ll come to me. And we’re going to have a long talk, Alfred. A very, very long talk.”

The boy nodded, sober and stunned. “Yessir. If you say so…My…Mister…”

“Holmes,” Mycroft said, voice cool and reserved.

“Holmes,” the boy parroted back. “Like the detective fellow?”

Mycroft gave a crooked smile. “Yes. He’s my brother.”

Alfred blinked, and gaped. “Wicked…”

“More than you will ever know,” Mycroft said. “Lucky you.”

He straightened then, and wobbled slightly. He was still in his Crombie coat. Still in his neat suit—the knees crushed and grubby with dust from the floor. The toes of his shoes were scraped up.

Lestrade held out an arm. “Let me see you home, yeah?”

Mycroft huffed. “I can call my car…”

“Let the man go. It’s Christmas—or near as makes no never mind. I’ve got my own car down the way.”

Mycroft studied him, and said in a wary voice, “You’re not planning on…bonding… Are you?”

“God forbid,” Lestrade said, a faint laugh hidden in the response. “Come along, Mr. Holmes. You’ve had enough excitement for one day. Bed-time for bosses….”

Mycroft snorted and rolled his eyes, but allowed himself to be led away from the cloister. As they exited the abbey they saw the missing bomb team rushing up with lights on tripods, with backup batteries and generators.

Lestrade laughed. “Little late, them.”

“The effort is appreciated,” Mycroft said, sounding suddenly weary.

“Hell of a night.”

“Indeed.”

They walked together. Lestrade noted that they kept pace together well, Holmes’ long legs stalking along easily with Lestrade’s own perambulation. Lestrade found his car, paid off the meter, unlocked, and waited for Mycroft to settle in before asking “Where to?”

“Pall Mall, opposite the Diogenes.”

“Can do.” Lestrade started the engine, checked all the mirrors and gauges, and pulled out into the modest traffic of late evening. Mycroft was on his mobile phone, letting his team know where he was, and that he was going off duty. Lestrade asked him if he’d relay the information to Lestrade’s own team, too. Mycroft did.

They sat silent together. “I’m taking the long route around,” Lestrade murmured after a while. “Work off the nerves. And less hassle stopping when we get there—I’ll be pointed the right way.”

Mycroft grunted. He fished in his pockets and pulled out supple lambskin gloves, black as jet. He eased them on. Lestrade glanced over and saw the faintest trace of a shake in those slim gloved fingers.

“Hell of a night,” he said.

“Indeed. A hell of a night.”

A few miles further, Lestrade said, “It was the carol, wasn’t it? ‘Midnight Clear.’ That’s what set you off.”

Mycroft was silent.

Lestrade drove on.

Eventually Mycroft said, “All that peace. ‘Peace on the Earth, Good will toward men…’ It all sounds so good on paper. Then you get to the ugly bits, and it falls apart between your hands.”

Lestrade drove along, thinking of all the ugly bits Mycroft Holmes dealt with, from wayward brothers to wayward nations. After a time he said, “Works more often than not, Mycroft. Even without us helping, odds are lower that people are going to kill each other than not.”

Mycroft growled, frustration in his voice. “Prove it. War in Syria, war in the Ukraine, war in more places in Africa than I can begin to count. Unofficial wars everywhere you look. Peace…” he huffed, and said, again, “Peace…” The second time the anger was gone, leaving only sorrow.

Lestrade intentionally dallied along the road, heading east, toward dawn…a dawn hours away.

“That was a good kid, tonight” he said after awhile. “You saved a good kid back there. Not to mention all the rest of us—for which I thank you. My life may suck—but it doesn’t suck enough for me to want to lose it during a nighttime carol service. But the kid—he was something, wasn’t he?”

He heard a soft almost chuckle, breathy and quiet. “Alfred.” Mycroft’s voice cherished the name, turning it fondly on his tongue, a smile glowing in every note as he named the boy “Alfred. Poor sod.”

“His mum was right,” Lestrade pointed out. “It’s better than Faisal Otto O’Malley.”

They both laughed, then.

“He’s gay,” Mycroft said. “Gay and smart and out of place as a…a…”

“Tennis player on a rugby field?”

Mycroft chuckled. “That will serve, yes.”

“Going to recruit him?”

“Better than sending him to Magistrate’s Court. He’s too old to be tried as a youth—and too young to send to prison for acts of terrorism. God, on the basis of that design alone, he’s not fit to serve time as a terrorist.”

“Terrified me,” Lestrade pointed out.

“Oh, me, too. But—“

“But it would be a waste, wouldn’t it?”

Mycroft sniffed, pretending not to care.

“And anyway,” Lestrade continued, teasing, “It’s Christmas. Wouldn’t do to wreck the lad’s life at Christmas…”

“I hardly see your point, Detective.”

“Detective Chief Inspector,” Lestrade pointed out, cheerfully. “And only two ranks under you in MI5.”

“Four under me in MI6.”

“Well—but MI6. They’re chinchy that way.”

Mycroft gave a sudden, brilliant shout of laughter…the first real laughter Lestrade had heard all night. He smiled to himself in the dark cab of the car, thinking of the huddled, unhappy man hiding away in the cloister, alone, haunted by a peace that seemed forever out of reach.

“What are you doing for Christmas?”

Mycroft settled back comfortably in the passenger’s seat. “I believe I’m going to be rearranging the life of Alfred O’Malley.”

“Besides that. Christmas with your folks? With Sherlock?”

“God forbid. Not since the last time, when Sherlock drugged the lot of us.”

“So?”

“What are you asking, Detective Chief Inspector?”

Lestrade smiled. “I don’t know. Maybe we could do the traditional and go out for Chinese together. Isn’t that what Jewish families do? A movie and then Chinese?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m not Jewish.”

“No—nor I. But after tonight I don’t see either of us doing Christmas Morning Service.”

“God forbid.”

“So?”

Mycroft considered. Then, warily, he said, “Perhaps movies at my place? And then maybe Chinese. Or I could have something ready…”

Lestrade could hear the other man—shy, reserved, ready to huddle at home rather than go out. He smiled to himself.

“No. Movie and Chinese. But—“ he said, cutting off Mycroft’s yowl of dismay, “But—if you watch the movie and eat your nice Chinese…I’ll let you take me home.”

The car fell silent.

Somewhat later, as Lestrade at last turned them around and headed back toward sunset and downtown London, Mycroft said, “Perhaps before I agree to your offer, we should try out the ‘take you home’ part. Just in case…”

“In case what?”

“In case you’re not interested?”

The hesitation broke his heart—and sent his spirit soaring. “Yeah. That’s good. We can, like, test it. Just to be sure.”

“Just in case.”

“No point putting together a whole holiday only to find we were wrong.”

“No.”

“So—I’m at yours for tonight?”

“If you like.”

“I could might do…”

They both smiled, white teeth flashing in the dark car.

As the car ate up the miles back to Pall Mall and Mycroft’s flat, the two men sang “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” in two-part harmony, baritone and tenor, and there was peace, good will toward men.


End file.
